Book Description

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. Novels and short stories William Wells Brown CLOTEL; OR, THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER Frederick Douglass THE HEROIC SLAVE Harriet E. Wilson OUR NIG; OR, SKETCHES FROM THE LIFE OF A FREE BLACK Nella Larsen QUICKSAND PASSING THE WRONG MAN FREEDOM SANTUARY Alice Dunbar-Nelson A CARNIVAL JANGLE VIOLETS THE WOMAN TEN MINUTES MUSING TITIEE Charles W. Chesnutt THE GOOPHERED GRAPEVINE PO' SANDY SIS' BECKY'S PICKANINNY THE DOLL THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH DAVE'S NECKLISS THE PASSING OF GRANDISON A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE THE SHERIFF'S CHILDREN BAXTER'S PROCRUSTES Paul Laurence Dunbar THE SCAPEGOAT Jean Toomer BECKY Poetry Phillis Wheatley POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL Frances E. W. Harper POEMS Langston Hughes THE WEARY BLUES Countee Cullen COLOR COPPER SUN THE BALLAD OF THE BROWN GIRL Non-fiction Olaudah Equiano THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO, OR GUSTAVUS VASSA, THE AFRICAN Mary Prince THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE, A WEST INDIAN SLAVE Charles Ball A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF CHARLES BALL Frederick Douglass NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE Josiah Henson THE LIFE OF JOSIAH HENSON Solomon Northup TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE Harriet Ann Jacobs INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL Elizabeth Keckley BEHIND THE SCENES Louis Hughes THIRTY YEARS A SLAVE Booker T. Washington UP FROM SLAVERY William Still THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD Henry Box Brown James Hambleton Christian Theophilus Collins Seth Concklin William And Ellen Craft Abram Galloway And Richard Eden Charles Gilbert Samuel Green Jamie Griffin Harry Grimes James Hamlet And Others John Henry Hill Ann Maria Jackson And Her Seven Children Jane Johnson Matilda Mahoney Mary Frances Melvin Aunt Hannah Moore Alfred S. Thornton Essays W. E. B. Du Bois THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK Charles W. Chesnutt THE DISFRANCHISEMENT OF THE NEGRO Paul Laurence Dunbar REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN NEGROES